Friday, December 3, 2010

Massachusetts not likely to be competitive

Mitt Romney is no longer a popular figure in Massachusetts and Barack Obama wouldn't have too much trouble winning the state for reelection even if he had to face a home town nominee.

51% of Massachusetts voters have an unfavorable opinion of Romney to only 40% who view him favorably. Republicans like him for the most part (a 75/14 favorability) and independents narrowly do so as well (50/44). But for a Republican to be popular in a deep blue state requires a lot of appeal to Democrats and that Romney has little of, with only 16% seeing him positively to 76% with an unfavorable opinion. Romney is no Scott Brown as far as appeal across party lines goes.

Obama on the other hand retains a healthy level of popularity in Massachusetts, with 55% of voters approving of his job performance and 40% disapproving. Obama leads Romney 52-43 in a hypothetical match up. While that's certainly closer than Massachusetts usually is at the Presidential level that's still a pretty weak performance for Romney at a time when Obama is at one of the lower points of his administration. Romney has the Republicans locked up. However he leads by only 11 with independents, when Brown showed you need to win them by about 30, and he gets only 15% of Democrats, when Brown showed you need to get at least around 20%. At this point it doesn't look like Romney would be a serious threat to Obama.

He'd certainly be better off than the rest of the possible Republican contenders though. Massachusetts voters have an extremely dim view of the other leading candidates. Mike Huckabee's favorability is a -19 spread (29/48), Newt Gingrich's is -31 (27/58), and Sarah Palin's is -41 (27/68). Given those numbers it's no surprise Obama trounces the rest of the field in hypothetical contests. He leads Gingrich and Huckabee by identical 57-33 margins. That 24 spread is similar to what he won in the state in 2012. Against Palin that advantage extends to 29 points at 61-32, an even more lopsided showing than Obama received against John McCain.

If Scott Brown runs for President some day maybe Massachusetts will be competitive again at the Presidential level, but it sure doesn't look like it will be in 2012.

7 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Mitt Romney was extemely innovative in developing a bi-partisan market based healthcare reform in Massachusetts that decidedly increased coverage among uninsured and also made provisions for citizens with pre-existing conditions to get insured. He balanced the budget. He is the only major politician that I can think of that can even think of ways of reducing costs through structural changes in the health care value chain. No Democrat has been able to bring that change in Massachusetts!

But, Romney is not a Democrat, does not give lofty speaches about gay rights or bringing people together. Instead, he did something concrete for the people of Massachusetts! And still people hate him there!

Not sure why anyone would want to lead in a state like Mass which has been retarded enough to repeatedly send Bawney Fwank or that dead idiot Ted Kennedy to DC for so long. Massachusetts is a massamorons.

Funny, funny. We actually have him beating all 4 Republicans in VA; beating only Palin in MO and down one to Gingrich; beating Palin and Gingrich and tying with Romney in NC; and down narrowly to Palin and Gingrich in MT. So he's not doing too shabby in the red/purple states he competed in (two of which he won and is up by larger margins in now, depending on the opponent).